Trading Off Complexity for Expressiveness in Programming Languages for Embedded Devices: Visions and Experiences

When programming resource-scarce embedded smart devices the designer requires both the low-level system programming features of a language such as C and higher level capability typical of a language like Java. The choice of a particular language often implies trade offs between conflicting design goals such as performance, costs, time-to-market, and overheads. The large variety of languages, virtual machines, and translators provides the designer with a dense trade off space, ranging from minimalistic to rich full-fledged approaches, but once a choice is made it is often difficult and tricky for the designer to revise it.